Blythe Masters (born 22 March 1969) is a British Private Equity executive and former financial services and fintech executive. She is a former executive at JPMorgan Chase, where she was widely credited as the creator of the credit default swap as a financial instrument. She is founding partner of FinTech private equity firm, Motive Partners, CEO of Motive Capital Corp, an Advisory Board Member of the US Chamber of Digital Commerce, a Board Member of GCM Grosvenor, Forge Global, CAIS Group, and Credit Suisse Group. Biography Education Born in Oxford, Masters was raised in the south-east of England. She attended The King's School in Canterbury. She graduated in 1991 from Trinity College, Cambridge with a B.A. in economics. Professional career JP Morgan Chase Masters joined the bank JP Morgan Chase in 1991 after completing a number of internships there while still a student dating back to 1987. Responsible for credit derivative products at J.P. Morgan, Masters became a managing director at 28, the youngest woman to achieve that status in the firm's history. She is widely credited with creating the modern credit default swap, a derivative used to manage credit exposure to underlying reference entities. In 1994, J.P. Morgan had extended a $4.8 billion credit line to Exxon, which faced the threat of $5 billion in punitive damages for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. A team of J.P. Morgan bankers led by Masters then purchased credit protection against the credit line to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development to cut the capital which J.P. Morgan was required to hold against Exxon's default, thus reducing its own risk. J.P. Morgan later bundled together packages of such exposures and offered them to market as BISTRO, for Broad Index Secured Trust Offering, and these new financial instruments were quickly adopted by other banking institutions. When derivatives played a role in the 2008 financial crisis, having been applied by other firms to sub-prime mortgages, Gillian Tett's book, Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dreams of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe, documented how the original intent and features of credit derivatives had been distorted. Nonetheless, Masters was described by the UK newspaper The Guardian as "the woman who invented financial weapons of mass destruction". The paper later apologised for failing to give Masters an adequate opportunity to respond to their characterisation. She had told